What Is Intermittent Fasting?

So fasting is merely any time that you
don’t eat. So the standard fast which everybody should be doing should be 12
hours, which is sort of like you finished dinner at 7:00 at night and you eat
breakfast at 7 a.m. That’s a 12-hour fast. That’s where the word ‘breakfast’
comes from. It’s a meal that breaks your fast. You can’t break your fast if you’re
never fast. So therefore, the implication is that
this is actually a part of everyday life. So you have to understand the body only
exists in two sort of conditions. It’s either in the fed state or the fasted
day. So you’re either eating, which is storing food energy, or you’re fasting,
which is you’re burning food energy. It’s one or the other, and you don’t do both
at the same time. You don’t eat and burn fat at the same time because when you
eat, your body receives the instructions to store body fat, because food energy’s
going in. So if you understand that then you understand that, well, if you simply
extend those fasting periods, then you allow your body to spend a little bit
more time burning off that food energy. Which is the sugar, which is making you
sick and giving you diabetes, type 2 diabetes, or the fat that’s sort of
clogging up all your organs, you get fatty liver and fatty pancreas and all that
sort of thing. So fasting is anytime you don’t eat. You can simply take that sort
of normal 12 hour fast and extend it to, say, 16 hours for example. So you eat
everything within an eight hour window, and that’s called a 16-8, it’s very
popular and that’s done most days of the week. Another sort of popular sort of
thing is to go to almost a 23 or 24 hour fast, which is a sort of one meal a day
sort of idea. So if you go from lunch to lunch or dinner to dinner,
that’s about 23 hours 24 hours in between the meals. The point is that use
you’re only storing food energy for one hour of the day and the other 23 hours
you’re gonna allow your body to essentially digest or burn off that
sugar. And that’s also a very powerful way to
get your blood sugars down in lose weight. Then you can go longer and longer,
so those are sort of the most popular sort of regimens and certainly for older
people we had encourage people to use sort of a shorter fast. So the difference
between fasting that was done sort of in the 70s, which actually had a few
problems, was that they were doing these super long fasts, like 30, 60 days at a
time, as opposed to say 24 hours which is really just sort of dinner to dinner. You’re still eating once a day. But you certainly can go longer if you want, but
as you go longer, there’s more power but then there’s also more risk. So you
have to be more careful for example, if you’re on medications, if you’re older, if
you have any concerns about malnutrition or underweight, then you have to be
a little bit more careful. But those are always options – you can go three days,
five days without food, it’s okay. The actually the average weight loss,
actual fat loss is actually, only half a pound of fat per day of fasting. So you
have to decide what you’re gonna do and why and that’s where having some
guidance might be very helpful, so the our program for example offers some
guidance, but most people would do very well to start with some of the shorter
fasts and then sort of dabble in with some of the long the fasts. And that’s
sort of the most important rule, the two most important rules of fasting, really. One is always be safe. So you’d want to make sure you speak to your doctor, you
you know what you’re doing, and if at any time you don’t feel well, you stop. So
always be safe, that’s number one. And the the other one that’s really important is
to fit it into your life, because if you start doing a fasting schedule, that
really doesn’t go along with your lifestyle, that’s not gonna last. So I had
one fellow one time, he would you used to go out with his friends and have lunch,
and he’d stop doing that to do the fast. I’m like, “No, no, no, no. That’s not the way it works.” You do what you normally do and you fit all the
stuff, all the fasting around that, because otherwise if you cut yourself
off from all your friends, you’re not gonna like it and you’re gonna stop
doing it. So it’s not viable in the long term.

I fast every Friday from dinner on Thursday night to breakfast on Saturday morning. I weigh myself on Sunday mornings. If I haven't lost a kilo from the previous Sunday, I fast on Monday, from Sunday dinner until Tuesday breakfast, as well. I've lost nine kilos in seven weeks and have eleven kilos to go.